English Sample Translation of Arcana of Faustus Verantius of Šibenik by Omer Rak

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Arcana of Faustus Verantius of Šibenik Omer Rak; translated by Ivana Ostojčić Chapter 11 Pan “Kwistijan is stupid, stupid, stupid!” Iskra stomped her feet against the threshold in a short dress and pink sandals, holding her rag doll Mia firmly in her hands, when Marija brought herback from Madam Roža. Kristijan was the son of Madam Roža’s tenants, a young married couple who worked at TLM factory.

“What happened? Didn’t you play?” I asked her, kneeling to look her in the eyes.

“Kwistijan is stupid!” Iskra repeated, apparently mad beyond her wits. “I wanted to pway Mum and Dad and he only chased lizawds.”

“Oh well, you’ll play another time,” I said in a conciliatory tone.

“I’ll never pway with him again! He is stupid, stupid, stupid!” she wouldn’t budge.

“Why? Because he didn’t want to play with you?”

“Because he was tearing the lizawds’ tails off and putting them… in a bottle.”

“That’s very nasty.”

“That’s really nasty,” Marija repeated.

“And then he… and then he,” she swallowed her saliva, “then he twied to scare me with these tails… and the tails move like… like… I… I cwied and ran away from him. He was laughing at me. He is bad.”

“Now, this is too much. If I was there, I’d pull his ears out!” I raged.

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“No need,” said Marija, “Madam Roža already did it.”

“So he cwied, and I told him he was nasty,” said Iskra much more cheerfully and gave me a hug, leaning her warm little face against my cheek. “I don’t like Kwistijan, I love you very much,” her little arms held me, “you and auntie.”

Marija kneeled and gave her a kiss. “We love you too very much, Iskra darling,“ she said. Still carrying the doll in her hands, she held us both in her arms, glowing with joy. That childlike sincere joy. Pure and innocent. Damn the war!

Night glided like hefty gelatine down the grooves of old city roofs and threadbare stone steps, when I set out for the Polyclinic and Emergency Room to look for Sweetie-Pie Guy. The lamps shed an eerie light on the cobbled stone streets covered in posters with the list of shelters across the city, sound alarms for air raids on one side, and open calls to Red Cross blood donors on the other. Radio and TV news seen and heard in these stone houses are normally broadcasted at maximum loudness, following my footsteps and echoing against the walls in narrow alleys amidst the running cats. Nothing new, unfortunately. Reports of a total and utter failure of the tourist season, leading to the closing down of hotels around Šibenik pile in, as well as of foreigners running for the hills, away from Skradinski Buk, of burnt out cars and explosives placed under the house owned by a Yugoslav military officer or a prominent Serb, of frequent military aircraft overflying the Šibenik area which, they stressed, disturbs the local population and chases away the tourists. Yugoslav People’s Army soldiers are becoming 3

impatient: at night, in front of the barracks in Rogoznica, a father who came to visit his son was killed; the people of Šibenik join in prayer to the protest of the Croatian Parents Movement for Protection and Return of Soldiers from YPA… Shotgun fire from Ostrovica pelted the Croatian village of Lišani near Benkovac. The cause for this latest in a number of attacks by ‘the Martić troops’ was the establishment of a police station in Lišani. A Croatian police officer and the local priest were shot dead, and many more were injured. Sweetie-Pie Guy must have had a real baptism by fire.

I turned around the corner by the courts, along the prison wall, towards the Polyclinic. The emergency room was in the basement. The entrance was crowded and jammed.

Three ambulances with beacons still on and behind them a van like the ones usually driven by market fruit and vegetable sellers, crammed in the narrow entryway. I came along just as the doorman was trying to shed some light on the inside of the van with his flashlight, where apparently two human bodies were lying covered in blankets.

“What is this,” the doorman asked the driver, a stocky man with a moustache looking like Joso ‘Strunjar’, and tugged one of the blankets.

“Our guys. Dead, from Lišani. The Chetniks killed them, motherfuckers they are,” said the driver acquiescently. Out of pure human curiosity (the one that draws us to observe other people’s suffering and misfortune), I leaned over the doorman’s shoulder. The sight that struck me under the light of his lamp literally froze me on the inside and cut my breath short.

Beneath the blanket was the head of a young man, his face in a spasm, his 4

eyes still open in a petrified cadaverous gaze. A few hours ago blood streamed from the dead man’s nostrils and mouth and now, clotted and stale, it remained on his upper lip and on the both sides of his chin like a sticky bloody delta. As much as this sight was both repugnant and frightening, my disposition found it somewhat bearable. I was used to such scenes, wiping blood from my aunt’s nose and mouth which often trickled in the final stage of her pulmonary disease after every harsher bout of coughing. Still, it is hard to remain unhinged by the brow of this deceased which, in fact, was not even there – its right side all the way to the temple was simply a bloody hole with sharp, fractured bone edges, covered in blood and pieces of brain. One look at this horrendous death scene sent my stomach on a rollercoaster. The only thing that crossed my mind was: I’m going to vomit! I’m not capable of controlling this side of me. But somehow, right then, the doorman covered the dead body back and turned to the moustached driver: “Wait here until they move the ambulance. Then take this van straight to the morgue, that building down there. Stop there and wait for them to take over the bodies.”

He saved me from vomiting.

The guy with the moustache nodded his head and asked: “How long am I supposed to wait?”

“As long as it takes for them to take out the injured,” responded the doorman, pointing towards the building entrance. “Have a little patience.

It’s worse for them then it is for those in your van. There’s nothing they could possibly need,” he left the conversation with a plausible argument.

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As they carried some of the wounded out on stretchers, others, with bloody bandages on their heads and arms, were aided into the clinic by the medical staff. Some of them were wearing auxiliary police uniforms. Some had their arms immobilised, two of them were walking with crutches, howling in pain at every step. Under the neon lights and beacons, the sight was horrendously disturbing. One is so easily overcome by fear below the belt. It did not take long to feel convulsions below my navel and my bowel set in motion. And not diarrhoea too! It was then that I saw Sweetie-Pie Guy. Together with a man in a white coat he was helping an injured man with a large bandage across his chest and over his eyes to enter the lobby. Leaning on the two of them, hands over their shoulder, the injured man wailed: “It hurts, oh Jesus, it hurts!” His whole face distorted into a large mask of pain. Seeing me there, Sweetie-Pie Guy motioned me to wait in the rest room, pointing in that direction. Was it because of the light or the excitement I was feeling, but his face seemed smeared with gunpowder, blood, dirt… As much as I could discern from where I was standing.

I bypassed the chaos in the emergency room lobby and found myself in the corridor leading to the room that served as a place of rest for the medical staff, mainly during night shifts.

I felt weak in the knees. I felt it as I was walking. So far I had never seen killed people. Virtual dead bodies on the news were not nearly as scary as those two poor souls wrapped in blankets in a van outside the Polyclinic.

The experience of death, so immediate and powerful, echoed inside me with dull vibration, calling to my mind the abhorred image of facing my own 6

death. Indeed, in a susceptible human soul such a sight instantly activates a projection of its own existential termination under painful, excruciating and inhuman circumstances. It is not only mere paranoia as an ‘unrealistic fear’, it is rather a primordial fear grounded on a horrendous perverted reality engendering an even more perverted vision of tomorrow. The ambulance experience was just a cruel reminder that so little time is left until, metaphorically speaking, one of Kafka’s executioners will reach for the knife from underneath his grey redingote and stab me in the heart, and with my last breath I will be wondering why, oh why, until the end of time.

God damned violence! It is not just killing, it happens every time we use an ugly word, every time we make a gesture at someone telling them that they’re not wanted, every time we’re obedient because we are afraid…

Violence is not only an organised butchery in the name of God, society or a state. It is something much, much deeper. What I’m seeing tonight in front of the Šibenik emergency room also rose from these depths. And this is still not the bottom, not even close. The deeper we sink, the deadlier, the more horrendous, more incomprehensible to the human mind these depths will seem. This is the phenomenology of every act of violence, which perpetuates new violence. Testifying to all this from the very beginning makes me restless. But, hey, who cares about my feelings after all?

An elderly, broad-hipped cleaning woman in a grey coat I had met in the hallway while she was mopping the floor with a wet cloth attached to a broomstick gave me a short hello and went on with the mopping.

Unauthorised personnel were not allowed to enter this part of the ER, but 7

since I often dropped in on Sweetie-Pie Guy, even during night shifts, beset by insomnia, the cleaning woman and the nurse, who just passed me by in the hallway and said hello, paid no attention to my presence.

The room was at the very end of the hallway, incredibly alike all such ER staff rooms, wherever they may be: three beds untidily clad with linen, a wardrobe with shoes neatly placed in front, an umbrella stand, a white plastic table and four chairs; windows, as tiny as bunker gun slits, facing north and aligned with the ground level. The room smelled of tobacco smoke and iodine. Two ashtrays full of cigarette butts – one on the table, the other on the radiator – were evidence that not even medical workers shied away from health risks.

As soon as I sat on a chair, in came Sweetie-Pie Guy carrying his oblique black leather bag with a medical kit and drugs. Indeed, I was right before, his face was all muddy and parts of it – his under-eye circles, the area around the eyes and ears, his chin – had dark blue traces that seemed unwashable.

He put the bag on one of the beds, took off his white coat smeared with blood, mud and that same colour smudged on his face, rolled it over his arm and gently put it into a large plastic bin beside his nightstand. He sat on the bed and perched his head in his hands, leaning on the elbows.

“Horror, it was horror, buddy,” his voice vibrated eerily. “Blood, brains, guts… a slaughterhouse. You know I’m not the type of guy who’d be scared or repulsed, but, man, I felt sick.”

“So, war it is,” I said to myself, feeling an uneasiness growing in my stomach.

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“War, man, the fuckin’ war has started,” Sweetie-Pie Guy confirmed, almost yelling. “I nearly got killed. I was this close!”

“How? You weren’t in a fight, were you?” I wondered.

“We were trying to rescue the injured, the driver and me. A mortar bomb exploded just a few yards away. The driver was shelled, I wasn’t. If I had been standing where he was, I would’ve been shelled too.”

“You should light a candle to Saint Francis,” I told him, recalling the patron saint of Betina, a village where his father was from.

“Him and all the other saints. It’s a miracle I even survived,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

“So what was the situation down there?”

“The Chetniks are holding a position up the hill and sending blasts all over the place with machine guns and mortars… Our guys would nail the motherfuckers in a blink, but the army cut their way with tanks. Those red star bastards are on their side. They gave them weapons so that they could beat us from up that hill as long as they felt like it. When Martić’s bastards retreated, the army and their tanks also retreated. They were protecting their ground.”

“And they said the army is unbiased in this conflict,” I commented ironically.

“Unbiased my ass!” yelled Sweetie-Pie Guy. “If they had interfered, the priest wouldn’t have died, nor the cop, nor would so many people be wounded. Nor would this fuckin’ war start.”

“I know, the first victim of war is the truth,” the thought crossed my mind.

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“I can’t take this anymore,” said Sweetie-Pie Guy and buried his face in his hands. “Ugly scenes are dancing in front of my eyes, I’m mad, I’m shaking all over, I went berserk.” He opened his bag and took out a syringe and a glass ampule. “I need to calm down, I’m all fucked up, I can’t take this… I need something to do the trick on the inside,” he was rambling to himself and scratching the ampule’s neck with a tiny iron saw.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the ampule.

“A morphine cocktail,” he responded, syringing out the transparent fluid from the ampule. “Lock the door, I don’t want people to see me.”

I turned the key twice, leaning my ear against the door to make sure no one was coming. I heard no footsteps.

When I turned, Sweetie-Pie Guy was already pulling the rubber strap with his teeth around his upper arm and shoving the needle in his vein. A few moments later he told me, in a voice that seemed to exhale in sheer excitement, that he felt like he was floating on a cloud of tits.

He closed his eyes. I felt incredibly sorry for him. He had been through hell.

He tasted the war first hand. All his life he will be carrying the burden of that trauma. And this was only the beginning of even worse traumas. I didn’t manage to tell him that Grumps died. Not that it mattered anymore.

I closed his bag and covered him with a sheet. He was breathing calmly, in the sweet embrace of Morpheus, the god of sleep from the ampule. A cure for all pains.

I unlocked the door and sneaked out.

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The cleaning lady was just closing the back door to the emergency room, echoing with cries and curses. The bucket in her hand was loaded with bloody bandages. I turned my head away. I had enough for tonight.

Peering into the crowds outside the ER doors, on my way out I almost bumped into Kike, dressed in combat trousers and a black T-shirt, tight on his chest. Around his head he had tied a black bandanna with a Croatian coat of arms on his forehead. A ‘Scorpion’ gun was attached to his belt on his right side and a bayonet on his left side. His square-shaped head, as though carved with an axe and planted on top of his robust neck, was the last thing I wanted to see. I had seen him around and hated talking to him. He was an unseemly guy, a troublemaker, a rowdy, recalcitrant personality, convicted several times for extortion and bodily harm. I steered clear of him and avoided him whenever I could, but this time I couldn’t just pass him by at the door. The war, which usually turns things upside down, allowing for the dregs to rise to the surface, has reversed the assessment of ‘the life and work’ of Kike: the yesterday’s convict was now a man of renown, although he hadn’t changed his behaviour the least. The war came handy to him, bringing values always diametrically opposing those of peace. However, on the other hand, if it were not for the enthusiastic volunteers in those first days of war, people like Kike, a person ready to smack someone’s face, reach for the knife or shoot if needed, since his experience in such matters was as opulent as his police records, the enemy would have literally glided into the city… and simply piled my dead body on top of a pile of other dead bodies because myself and other ones like me were useless in providing any kind of 11

resistance, let alone armed. As though I didn’t even exist. Kike was defending the city, not me. And that was the truth, whether I liked it or not.

“What’s up? Where you been? I didn’t see you in the troops,” he was all in my face. A smell of tobacco and bad wine filled my nostrils.

“Well… I couldn’t find the time, well, you know…” I fumbled and mumbled uneasily.

“Cut the crap and join the troops,” Kike repeated, raising his tone.

Seeing my blank face, he grabbed me by the shoulders with both hands and shook me well and hard: “Are you a Croat or what, you motherfucker?!” I just stared blankly at him, not knowing who I was.

“Of course I am,” I replied in a Pythian manner.

“You better be there the next time I come,” he said and slapped me on the back with his wide palm. His voice was beaming with threat. Then he said somewhat more mildly: “Do come. We’re a good crowd. As soon as the barracks are down, there’ll be weapons too. We’ll kick them motherfuckin’ bearded asses! They’ll be shovelling them around in pieces!” he exclaimed and shook his fist near my face.

I watched his clenched fist blankly. It reminded me of republican posters from the Spanish Civil War and their ‘no pasarán!’ He left me when he was called to the check-in counter. I let go a loud sigh of relief.

‘The Šibenik trifler and leader of the pack’, as Simo Matavulj, an outstanding connoisseur of the life of his fellow citizens, dubbed himself, whose forefathers had settled in Šibenik exactly 285 years ago, says in his Writer’s Notes that “in the shoes of every man from Šibenik is at the same 12

time a gentle troubadour, a cruel renegade and a diligent labourer: when you push the right button, one part of this trinity shall arise.” I am certain that in my shoes neither of Matavulj’s three lives, perhaps only the first to some degree – the gentle troubadour – if taken in the broader sense, as a poet. In times of war, Muses fall silent. These are the times of voiceless lyres.

Therefore, according to Matavulj’s denomination of the Šibenik identity, I wonder, do I even belong to this city? Have I got even the tiniest bit of it under my skin?

When you’re not that eager to fight, you could have at least signed up for Civil Protection, a voice inside me was reprimanding me, and be of use to your fellow citizens. While they’re defending the city with their bare hands, it is vile and irresponsible to avoid commitment as if it were none of your business. You don’t live, the voice kept telling me, in another space-time dimension, untouched by the menacing reality, quite the contrary. Isn’t it discouraging to take fear and anxiety as an alibi for one’s own incompetence, for one’s own unjustified exclusion from taking part in defence? It is a loathsome, disgraceful stand, I scolded myself.

But is there no one else but me working on Faust’s manuscript, a defensive idea came to my mind, the writing in which by the grace of God I might find the salutary, occult solution to this chaotic situation? I don’t know yet how, but I am convinced that Faust knew how to reconcile the hostile elements and equalise them to bring peace, what we now need most. If I can get my hands on the Stone, I’ll be able to defend the city in a very original way, to say the least.

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*** On my way home I took off downhill along Matija Gubec Street , passed by the Puppet Theatre, to Vanjski, all the way to Težačka. Following this street, I came to Građa and then up the hill to the Health Centre; then I proceeded again downhill to Crnica, turned left above the cemetery near Sveta Nediljica. There, in 1647, according to the historical records of the Cretan War written by the Šibenik historian Frane Divnić, many severed Turkish heads rolled when the defenders of Šibenik and Morlachs led by their adept commander, the Venetian mercenary baron von Dagenfeld, from St. Michael and St. John’s Fortress counterattacked the surprised Turks led by pasha Tekelija, for this occasion specially appointed from Istanbul. It says in the records that on that day, 8th of September, on the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, when pasha commanded a full charge, a torrential rain shower came down… and soaked all the gunpowder. The only thing left was melee weapons: maces, pickaxes, rapiers, daggers, swords, yataghans and khanjars.

Dagenfeld’s first command said: stab, slaughter, cut! The second, after six hours of bloodshedding battle – let all church bells ring Te Deum! The city’s bells cloaked the agony of dying Turks as the misericordia daggers stabbed them in the hearts, relieving them with a final coup de grâce.

Three and a half centuries after this massacre and butchery, I stood on this flattened ground above the cemetery for a moment and looked at the sky.

Bleak lights from the houses at Crnica and the fortification which shrouded the city lights made this the perfect spot for observing the nocturnal skies, as I stood in complete darkness. A few yards away a small church, 14

surrounded by cramped stone graves festooned with crucifixes, and the serenity of cypresses feasting on the silver stars. I felt as though I could hear the sighs of defeated Turks, the murmur of their souls that found no rest in a foreign land.

A magnificent swarm of stars glittered above my head. Flickering with a distant glow. My gaze fixed on the nocturnal firmament, I recalled the words of Posidonius, the Syrian stoic, adept to the ancient Chaldean religion. I kept repeating them in my mind like a credo, like the most precious memento of one’s true home. I sense with unspeakable force (just like Posidonius) that the desire in beholding the glistening star-spangled sky is in fact a divine passion elevating us to the azure. In the night, our spirit is inebriated with the glow sprinkled over us by heavenly fires. Like a Corybant, infatuated with orgies, we surrender to ecstasy which delivers us from bodily chains and shackles and lifts us way up high, to the placid regions, where everlasting stars (which, mind you, as Ficino taught, possess a sense of sight and hearing) glide in the radiant ether. Our souls, “on the wings of enthusiasm”, set in the middle of the holy choir, the harmony of motion, where it is fed the life of blissful gods… and the mystery is revealed in a river of light beyond the edge of human reason. Contemplation of the skies therefore becomes a union, Posidonius is clear.

Turning around in the darkness by the cemetery and gazing upwards, I thought I was inside a circle surrounded by the celestial canopy. But the circle isn’t there: the sky is infinite, the universe is an endless space. A circle is easy to determine with what is inside or outside of it, but what if the circle 15

is so great that it encompasses everything, that there is absolutely nothing beyond it? Then the only thing we could do I call it one body or one thing.

This was not the first time that I matured to such a revelation, but tonight it somehow felt special, quite extraordinary and elevated. This drop of honey from the ether above rose inside me like sun, clarifying the idea that there is not even the slightest distance between what it is and how it is, between the being and its manifestation – this oneness means that everything is made out of one matter and, since these thingsare not separated, multitude is aligned in union.

In such a manner, differences, paradoxically, become a vision of union. This does not necessarily mean that the cypress tops by the cemetery wall, the stone crucifix on the tomb, the lights reflecting on the calm sea down below the Krka rowing club and my connected perceptions and mental conditions do not mutually differ. They do, of course. But this difference is not exclusive, written in stone once and for all, unchangeable. What connects them, dissolving the masks of their extraordinariness and prominence, is a mystical realisation that all of them, as they are, are different expressions of one reality, like an orchestra of different instruments building harmony or colourful threads woven into the same piece of cloth. The manifestations appearing here and now as my body and my mind, on the one hand, and all that is not me on the other, do not entail separation from one thing – all these appearances are inextricably linked to one thing, moreover, they are this one thing. One body appears as all the things, not ceasing to be one body. Entirety

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is nowhere but in all of its diverse manifestations which have, naturally, always been entirety itself.

Such is the wisdom of stars oozing from above in torrents of light! It opens my eyes to understand the words of Senior about how the sages called the Stone ‘all things’, because all that their skill needed was in it, from it, to it and for it. It dawned on me that one, unique mass is moving and transforming everything to everything, akin to Bruno’s Proteus who is capable of transforming from everything to everything, who expounds everything from everything, discovering everything from everything, without becoming larger or smaller, for all times remaining how he is now – one thing – not being something else, not becoming something else, something that he might transform into. For, He is All in All, I hear Basil Valentine whispering. Even in the excrement, as Latin alchemists claim – in stercore vili invenitur lapis philosophorum.

Therefore, my essence is the good itself, the pure essence of immortality; it does not deteriorate, it is as steadfast as eternity itself, moreover – it is eternity itself. It is the elixir sought in the early decades of the 16th century by the legendary magician doctor Faustus, and half a century later by Faustus Verantius of Šibenik, publicly an inventor and polyhistor, privately an alchemist, both in Prague, where the devil drew the former through a hole in the roof of his house and the latter flew with the help of his device, just like the former prophesied.

Undoubtedly, all these mystical ideas, I thought as they warmed my heart while I was coming down the steep Dolac steps in front of the Holy Cross 17

Church, were chased out of me like a fox from the trap hole. All this miraculous gnosis of the matter divine had always lain compressed inside me, waiting for the right moment to fly out. Whatever may happen, it seems that without ugly existential moments this gnostic feast of my own spirit would not be possible, since it started rolling the moment fear froze me to the bone and anxiety weakened to the point of unrecognisable, while sinking into the jittery dregs of my own dejection and gloom was quite certain. Fear, this unthinkably powerful energy hunched in the roots of my being, made me run away from myself to return to myself, but to a different ‘self’… absolutely immersed into itself.

Feeling like a wave aware of the ocean, I rushed home, passing along the alleys between old stone houses, below windows with shutters ajar, where old ladies of Šibenik perched on to catch some air. A quiet murmur, a voice of the TV news anchor or a film sometimes reached the street. In a dark corner, behind the garbage bins, cats’ eyes glowed like fireflies. Down below, a group of youngsters were rolling a joint. A drunkard grimaced by an entrance. From St. Laurence’s convent garden nightingales were singing.

I was close to home. Very close.

I unlocked the door carefully and silently climbed the stairs to the first floor.

A few floorboards creaked beneath my feet. It is dark. I don’t want to turn on the light. Marija and Iskra are asleep. Iskra’s head is resting on Marija’s arm. Next to her, her rag doll Mia. Even in the shadows, I can see a smile on her face. When they are asleep, children go back to their original, angelical nature. Their innocence is the pledge of their dreams. Sleep is the drop of 18

life blooming in the vast skies of their innocence – a pure, pristine, infinite spirit as fragile as cherry blossom petals. Children’s dreams are pure freedom, beyond the miseries of hell and rapture of paradise; children float across their dream in a seamless space. Asleep, they close like water lilies and every drop of this world slides from them to the depths of inexistence like water from the flower. Blessed are their eyelids.

And what about young women, this juicy poetry drenched in the ether of sleep, the softened, supple body endlessly kissed by Amor in the darkness?

Prone and supine, they only fantasise of love as Hypnos is brushing their foreheads with a glass of poppy. Their wombs are filled with wonder-clad dreams bursting with life in all the colours of the world. Their breasts are two pomegranate seeds; ever flooding in immortal nectar which drenches their bosom with the dew of ecstasy. This dreamy, divine body…

As much as the war repels me, in a way I am thankful for it. If it were not for the war, I would never witness this peaceful and inspiring idyll in the bed at home. Peace would hardly cross the threshold here. The two of them in this bed saved me from my restless self. They were destined to do so. They were foreordained by a compassionate, tender-hearted deity. No one else.

Still carefully choosing where to place my foot on the stairs (I knew exactly which floorboards squeaked and which were rotten), I reached the room and turned on the lamp. I fidgeted around the bed, not knowing what to do with myself. I even turned the TV on. They were broadcasting an American film.

Their heroes are saving the world again. A typical insult to the audience with their pro-militarist patriotism, festooned with an unbearable amount of 19

propaganda and tech-fetishism celebrating the weapons of war and the oxymoron of military humanism, aiming always to illuminate the humane accomplishments of US army’s heroism. For God’s sake, give me a break! *** Repulsed, I turn the TV off and take out Faust’s manuscript from the secret hiding place in the floor. I feel remorse for not spending more time studying it. I need to invest more effort, I blame myself, working on this manuscript, a gift from Mercy, before the enemy attacks from land, sea and air. When that happens, I won’t be able to read these yellow pages from the grave anymore. The dead and the wounded in front of the ER are a cruel and sad reminder that the space of my freedom is growing narrow, tight and panicky, for heaven’s sake. I feel as though I’m trapped in a gorge of events whose walls are getting tighter and tighter with every new grain of sand that oozes out of the clepsydra of time.

Nevertheless, despite the sheaths of darkness that clog my soul with fear day in and day out, there is something – a reason why my life is not crouching at the pitch-black bottom of the grave – this light inside me – the light I tasted up there by the cemetery, capable of destroying and deconstructing all the darkness in the deep well of my downfall and carry me out of there into an infinite expanse of freedom, of light itself. Did Khunrath not see that the divine light, the same that becomes intellect, reason and capability of human beings to comprehend God, penetrating into the centre of the earth, shrouded by darkness? Was it not Fludd in his radical theogony of darkness and light who saw God himself, once as Apollo, other time as Dionysus, as 20

light and darkness, as the source of good and evil? Was I not made in the image of God, a magnificent chiaroscuro, a symphony of absolute contrast?

I read Faust’s manuscript in the usual way, not skipping pages, but rather carefully following the numeral sequence in the lower right-hand corner of each page, written by friar Anselmo. I want to believe the friar and follow his lead. All until now, this was to me the most confident road, charted by the absolutely credible expert, but also an accomplice in discovering and safekeeping Faust’s manuscript (and secret). Adding to this his priceless comments, it didn’t even cross my mind to read the manuscript ‘my own way’, according to my own judgment of priorities on particular pages.

In a note below the text, the friar says that Faust’s sentence from the beginning of this part, “after we started the conversation at the enclosed garden

(hortus

conclusus),

somewhat

later

we

found

ourselves

at Kunstkammer,” does not clarify where they started the conversation. It could easily be the enclosed garden at Rudolf’s summer palace, but, knowing that the nature of the manuscript is hermetic and interwoven with fine symbolical texture, ‘the enclosed garden’ could easily be something completely different. Friar Anselmo sheds light on this mystery quite originally: One unintroduced into our art will surely not take a moment to ponder on this (enclosed garden) to divine its meaning. This is the quality of superficial minds. Someone else, less superficial, will doubtlessly resort to the meaning of ‘the enclosed garden’ as one of the traditional poetic attributions to the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Such person can rightfully 21

claim that the origin of this attribution is the Vulgata, where the Song of Songs (4:12) says: Hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus. (“You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride; you are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain.”) Effigies of the Virgin in Fra Angelico’s fresco Nativity or the namesake tempera on wood by Domenico Veneziano testify to that, as well as the oil Virgin and Child with Saints and Donor by Gerard David (or the etching by Rudolf’s portraitist Martin Kolunić Rota of Šibenik, Litanies of Loreto – a depiction of the Virgin with lilies in her hand and baby Christ in her arms, standing on a crescent moon surrounded by the litanies like Stella maris, Speculum sine macula, Porta coelli, Puteus aquarum… among which, in the lower part of the engraving, also stands Hortus conclusus, next to a four-sided garden enclosed by a high wall and closed gates.

The rules of interpreting the emblem of the ‘enclosed garden’ or an ‘enclosed yard’ symbolically pointed to Mary’s eternal virginal nature even after conception, but also the very Immaculate Conception, because the enclosed garden was the symbol of Mary’s ‘enclosed’ womb, which had to remain intact and protected of sin with a wall.

On my part, I do not exclude the possibility that Faust, inserting hortus conclusus as the ‘place’ where the conversation between him and his sovereign, had something completely different in mind. I am prone to thinking that the conversation began in the very ‘virgin’ – a pure mind, cleaned of imaginary and conceptual leanings. Only such a mind, which is nothing but the pure essence of soul, is the guarantee that the symbol is

22

planted where it can be cognised in its entirety and comprehensiveness… and that a hermetic conversation may begin.

Faust’s writing on Kunstkammer and Rudolf’s hermetic contemplations follow. However, before that, quite unexpectedly and seemingly slipshod, he inserts a few sentences about Maria, again focusing on her nightmares, still present in her dreams, which was the visible cause of his unrest.

Doubtlessly, this was the weight that burdened him growingly, not finding any solace or relief for Maria’s suffering.

I honestly do not know how to help my Maria. Various medical cordials and concoctions have proven useless, just like her persistent prayers and mine, or the prayers of Capuchin monks from the monastery of Hradčany, whom I paid to pray for her, all is in vain. A demonic woman is sucking life out of her. If we lived an age of paganism, I would take her to Asclepion, for the god Asclepius to cure her with medicinal sleep. Otherwise, I do not know what to do. My heart is bleeding in pain when I see her suffer. I tried to find the interpretation of dreams in books of dreams by Artemidor, Ibn Sirin, Alcindus, I studied melancholy and evil spirits many list as causes, I did everything I could, but I am still unable to help her – to chase out this demonic spectre from her imagination, this incredibly beautiful woman with a bargain on her life. I would give anything and do anything to relieve her of this pain, I would stop at nothing…

Ah, Maria!

The dove’s heart is clad in sharp thorns.

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His Majesty carefully began rummaging over his collection of gallstones taken out of animals and little balls of bezoars, congealed stomach contents of ruminant animals, rock-solid and stone-like in appearance. Both were widely believed to be indispensable in cases of poisoning, moreover, that they were capable of chasing off even the plague. In a mahogany box (edged with black pearls), there was a large number of these round shiny stones he was now turning over in his hands and examining closely. I remember his utmost delirium when his imperial mother gave him a giant bezoar, a gift from the viceroy of the Portuguese Indies. The smile on his face glowed for days on end. As though that giant weight had been lifted off his soul… All until the spies dropped him the news of his brother Matthias.

Behind his bent and intent figure, in finely crafted glass bottles and on shelves different wonders from all four corners of the world perched: dry human-shaped mandrake roots, countless fossils, whale’s teeth, foetuses with abnormal deformations, the jaw of a Greek mermaid who lured Odysseus to the rock, fur fallen from the sky, an alleged basilisk, demons trapped in glass, Hercules’s arrow that killed the centaur Nessus, stuffed birds from the Indian Ocean, rare dodo bird’s eggs, a silver bell to summon departed souls, Egyptian mummies, unicorn horns… There was also a dragon the Caesar himself dried and preserved in real-life scale – this was once conferred to me by the court doctor de Boodt, swearing on the truth of this story with his honour. He kept it safe in a massive oak cabinet behind opaque glass which covered the entire southern wall of the room, right by the skeletons of diverse overseas creatures hanging from the ceiling. I never 24

saw it, nor did I ever wish to see it,but I respected the emperor’s passion for collecting these curious and miraculous natural scientific artefacts. I found the rare holy relics he had gathered much more intriguing, such as the grain of red dust God made Adam from, two iron nails from Noah’s ark, or Moses’s famous stick he hit the cave of the Mount Horeb with, making it spring with water.

The relics were placed in the middle, between the imperial collection of amulets, coins and medals on one side, and musical and astronomic instruments, clocks and different mechanical devices and automatons on the other, examined, disassembled and reassembled with undivided attention by my master day and night. His fascination with the holy relics was not an expression of his Christian beliefs – rather, it was an echo of his fascination with what he saw at El Escorial, at his uncle’s, Philip II’s residence. The royal chambers kept over six thousand holy relics and 130 skulls of martyrs. It was not secret that the emperor was endlessly in love with his diverse collections.

Whoever had a chance to meet him and discuss these matters or offer him a novelty idea, he would immediately be all ears, as testified by the Venetian ambassador Tommaso Contarini.

All of the emperor’s collection at Kunstkammer were carefully kept and very few people were allowed to enter and browse, unless it were due to a formal diplomatic duty. I saw that he had introduced a delegation of Savoy led by Count Manfredi di Luserno to the Kunstkammer, before they left Prague, as well as some other delegations. Foreign delegates were introduced to the imperial cabinet of curiosities, where the emperor usually bestowed on 25

them a valuable gift as a token of his good will and benevolence, primarily political. The Venetian envoy Piero Duodo once recounted that it sufficed for him to congratulate the emperor on one occasion on his military victory over the Turks and the emperor himself enthusiastically introduced him to the Kunstkammer and gave him the grand tour as his personal guide.

As far as I can remember, the collections were also seen by the cardinal Alessandro D’Este, archduke Maximilian III, the Grand Master of Teutonic knights and the regent of Tirol, the Saxon duke Christian II and the Bavarian duke Maximilian I. These latter two were received by my sovereign to a private audience at the Kunstkammer. Both were thrilled by what they saw and expressed their undivided virtus to the emperor, their extraordinary respect for his collection, particularly due to the fact that they too were passionate collectors with whom the emperor occasionally exchanged exhibits.

The imperial Kunstkammer, as I saw it, was a living instrument in the hands of the emperor, his own endlessly interesting and often bizarre manner of expressing himself. Meeting him almost daily in his wondrous cabinet was an incredibly rare honour he only bestowed to the very few chosen closest associates. Knowing this did me proud.

Although he seemed to be busy observing the polished, round stones, I knew with confidence that this would not bother him a bit to fire away some sarcastic remark, a witty comment, a quote or an idea seemingly unconnected to the conversation topic, only to prove a moment later that this ‘absurdity’ was the essence of the conversation topic.

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I used to see him struggling with onerous hermetic symbols inside, trying to resolve them. He would put his hand behind his back and walk around looking down, uttering only a barely audible ‘mhm’ from time to time as an expression of internal scepticism, thoughts, attempts at grasping the meaning with the help of analogy, I do not know. Then, still pensive, he would take a sip of wine from his glass and a bite of candied almond, and with a still moist thickened lower lip he would cast his eyes upwards, to the ether of symbols like a tail of a paper-kite carried by the wind.

In such moments hermetic contemplation would detach him from the world and his utmost misery and elevated him to the outer regions, where symbols lived in a world of their own, wondrous new bodies helping novices to ‘read’ the world around them clearly and protect them from all the evils of the era – from Vatican nooses, protestant harquebuses, Turkish stakes and family daggers. Time and time again he sighed, walking and emitting different sounds as though he was wrestling with an angel like Jacob, so unrelenting was his inner tension. When this struggle made him look, God help us, as though he succumbed and was at the end of his wits, then he would reach for the precious stones he had in large amounts, of different sizes, shapes, colours. He would pick one jewel from the golden casket, fashioned by master Cellini, and massage his forehead and temples, releasing loud sighs of relief. After a while, he would turn to me and continue our conversation refreshed and often rewarded with a profound insight springing from this spiritual struggle. He believed that the symbols had neither a final nor an exclusive meaning and that they could encompass an infinite number of 27

aspects of reality. Looking at him trying to grasp the symbol, intuitively overarching himself and capture inside an endless number of its definitions, he seemed as though he had already ingested the medical recommendation intended for Hermes in Corpus: “Grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God.” Sometimes I was convinced that he could. Am I blaspheming? Mea culpa, Domine.

The word of the ‘wonders’ at the imperial Kunstkammer was spread by all those who were allowed to enter and tour it. Naturally, this was not a simple cabinet filled with bizarre curiosities of all sorts an eccentric sovereign had collected and tossed inside, by no means! Faust is very clear: The purpose of the imperial Kunstkammer was much more than, to put it mildly, a capricious desire of a monarch to kill time by collecting curious exhibits

from

all

over

the

world

and

piling

them

up.

His

Majesty’s Kunstkammer was supposed to become the ‘great theatre of the world’ (theatrum mundi), a comprehensive natural history encyclopaedia so as the knowledge contained on its ‘pages’ might unlock the mysteries of nature. The more extreme, precious and wondrous these ‘pages’ were, the wider the gates of nature opened for him.

In selecting the natural and other exhibits for his cabinet of curiosities, my Caesar followed no one’s theories, let alone aesthetics. For instance, to him the recommendation of aestheticist Lomazzo addressed to painters that ugly body parts or other less-sympathetic things should be covered with a 28

cloth, a leaf or a hand was unacceptable, since he did not shun the ‘concept of ugliness’, as average minds perceived it, or at least not as to aestheticist Bellori, who related it to the demonic and avoided even to think about it.

Furthermore, the more repulsive, deformed and ugly were the exhibits in his cabinet, the more he subscribed to Pythagoras and his hypothesis that nature’s bosom cannot engender a contemptible thing. The emperor’s cabinet of curiosities was an evident practicum of this philosophical gnome, which he breathed life into with each new exhibit, from a two-headed human foetus with a cleft tongue and a foal’s tail, to a donkey’s bezoar (allegedly Balaam’s), or something else ‘ugly’ if not monstrous in the eyes of those who, led by the sentiment of the word, perceived those things differently.

He saw no difference in drying eighteen frogs and crushing them into powder (this is what it took to make one Crollius’s amulet) and then crushing precious corals and emeralds and mixing them with the frog powder. The crushed frog powder and crushed emeralds and corals were equal in his eyes, only different aspects of One, however we may call it, ugly or beautiful, whether we are repulsed or attracted by it. His entire Kunstkammer, as he saw it, was only a diverse manifestation of One in its most unexpected and most curious forms appearing in the ‘great theatre of the world’, playing the assigned roles. Like actors on stage.

I was beset by the idea that this theatrum mundi could easily carry the former attribution, hortus conclusus, because it was the womb safekeeping a remarkable fruit – the human desire for all-encompassing knowledge.

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Therefore, this ‘womb’ had to be separate from the rest of the world, enclosed by walls in a cabinet of curiosities. To remain virginal.

He never chose favourites among the exhibits in his cabinet of curiosities – all were equally precious and valuable, each contributed with the very mystery of fickle nature embodied in a concrete object. My sovereign equally treated all the books, regardless of whether they were found ‘perverted’ to Christianity, banned and included in the Vatican index librorum prohibitorum, or whether they miraculously continued to live off the list.

As one of the richest and most powerful people of his time, he could afford himself the luxury of relishing the forbidden fruit, and even host at his court heretics like Francesco Pucci and the prince of all the heretic souls, the Nolan Giordano Bruno. The former I met in the company of John Dee and Edward Kelley, and once he confided in me that Dee had conveyed him the secret of angelical language and the skill of looking into the crystal ball. I welcomed Bruno in person when he arrived from Wittenberg as ‘Iordanus Nolanus Neapolitanus, theologiae doctor romanensis’. He greeted the emperor as a new Hermes Trismegistus who would establish a new age of enlightenment and remove from the people’s lives the abuse of superstition – a dark, perverted and cruel religion – in order to accomplish a true religion without controversies, a pure movement of the soul based on the general law of love. It was one of those rare moments when the emperor’s face glowed with a smile of satisfaction.

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In a complementary reference, friar Anselmo makes a note that in October 1594, when Faust’s acquaintance, the Dominican monk Tommaso Campanella was imprisoned in Rome by the Inquisition for heresy, two of Rudolf’s guests had already been there in captivity – Francesco Pucci and Giordano Bruno; the former was executed in 1597, the latter in 1600. As the friar says, both of their ossa et cineres, bones and ashes, were thrown into the Tiber. Friar Anselmo continues with a magnificent sonnet by Campanella, dedicated to prison, Al carcere, describing the inescapable fate of free spirits, bound to end up in such a place, which he compares to the Cyclops Polyphemus’s cave, the Cretan labyrinth and Atlas’s palace. These spirits, says the enthused Campanella, abandoned the insipid lakes of ordinary worldly knowledge in order to embark defiantly to the ‘ocean of truth’.

After half a year in the imperial court, during which time he wrote two books (one dedicated to the emperor, the other to his friend, the Spanish emissary), I paid the Nolan 300 golden talers which my master had generously donated him before he returned to Germany. Despite the leanings he felt for Bruno’s teaching, the Caesar was reasonable enough not to let him teach and remain in Prague. He simply did not want to wave the red flag in front of the horns of the irksome catholic phalange – the Jesuits, the Holy See, the Spanish and Austrian part of his family, and especially his mother, Maria of Austria, who came back to her native Spain nine years ago and said with a sigh of relief how happy she was to live in a country purified of heretics. He knew well what he was dealing with.

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On departure, the Nolan gave me his book published here in Prague, written against mathematicians and philosophers, dedicated to emperor Rudolf (Articuli centum et sexaginta…), packed with geometrical diagrams and magical numerology he calls ‘mathesis’. Although our opinions significantly differed on the matters of religion, ethics and cosmology, I have to admit I rather read him, sometimes even with pleasure, than saw and heard him. His unpleasant, choleric, petulant temper revolted me. He would snap in a second. He was a troublemaker, irritable in arguments, hot-headed, unrelenting to the bone. As such, stubborn, he remained for eight long years in the inquisitional prison, all until he was burnt, which provoked my admiration despite the repulsion I felt for him as a person.

“Do you know what Bruno said about how real philosophy perceives music and poetry?” the Caesar said after a long break, still fiddling with the bezoars.

I knew, naturally, how could I not? I have read it in the document on composing images, sings and ideas, De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione, the last Bruno published before he was arrested in Venice and extradited to the Inquisition. “To real philosophy, music or poetry are also painting, and real painting is also music and philosophy,” I quoted from my memory.

“And real poetry and music are a kind of divine wisdom and painting,” the Caesar added, blowing away the dust from a pink bezoar. He loved to read Bruno and equally loved to discuss his hypotheses with me, although I was always trying to detach from some that opposed my religion’s dogmas or 32

removed the Earth from the centre of the universe, which was often accompanied by the emperor’s ironic persiflage. The Nolan was to his taste, not only because of the amalgam of kabbalah, hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, magic, mnemonics, the Chaldean and Egyptian teaching, to which he subscribed, but also because of analogy, which he claimed to be – the real religion of Bruno. He explained that he discussed this with him in person, right here (allegedly he showed an interest in the imperial collection of astrolabes, the dried dragon did not impress him much). He said that the Nolan was trying to convince him that the meaning of words, images, sounds and symbols cannot be determined semantically, but understood only intuitively and analogically through other words, images, sounds and symbols, and that the sphere of mind is a fantasy world in which understanding does not happen rationally, but rather only by contemplating images or assumptions etc. Therefore, he had dedicated to it a book full of mnemonic, magical diagrams.

“Therefore, every painter is naturally a builder of infinite images“, he continued and put the last of the bezoars in the casket. “For his powers of forming images, he is like a prophet. His imagination leads him to the truth or, at least, to meaning,” he concluded quoting Bruno, and placed the casket back in the cabinet where he had taken it out of. Then he turned to me.

“And I would like to show you a three-dimensional image painted by the imagination of a magician and cabbalist in my laboratory,” he accentuated looking me in the eye.

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"A three-dimensional image?! I do not understand what this is,” I shrugged helplessly. What has he got concocted over there in the alchemical laboratory in Mihulka Tower? What sort of surprise?

Young Rožemberk, the emperor’s page, suddenly appeared and bowed before him. His Majesty summoned me: “Come, master Vrančić, it is time.

I believe what you are about to see in Mihulka Tower will remain in your memory.”

“It most certainly will, Your Majesty, it most certainly will,” I replied out of courtesy, not knowing how much truth there was in these words.

If only I had known! If only I could have avoided going there!

The emperor rushed towards the laboratory.

Even in a hurry, he was trying to remain refined and dignified. The way he walked with his short, fat legs, holding his head up high with a black felt hat that left only his blond hair uncovered, waving his arms, turning his eyes. In fact, each and every motion was long shaped by the strict etiquette and Spanish court ceremony during his eight youthful years with his brother Ernst at El Escorial, the home of his uncle Philip II, a lover of Bosch and Titian, holy relics and inquisitional pyres. He taught him arrogant manners and uptight poise, but also decision-making – slowly and at the very last moment. The Venetian Contarini called this trait of his “cautious hesitation”. Was what I was about to see in the laboratory also a fruit of his cautious hesitation? I doubt it. Or a mere whim not caring for the consequences? After this, will we both be closer to the Stone we yearn for, to grant us peace we so desire?

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“Remember the subtitle of Bruno’s third book, the fifth chapter in De imaginum?” he asked casually, continuing his pace.

“Proteus in Mnemosyne’s House,” I replied.

My answer seemed to have had him braked. He suddenly stopped. I almost charged into him. He turned. “Watch this!” he said and pointed his right index finger upwards.

“When I say the name of this Titaness and the mother of Muses – Mnemosyne! – what is the first that comes to your mind? Now!” “Melusine!” I burst without thinking.

“Well, today you might met a proper Melusine, my dear secretary,” he said with a mysterious smile. Then he turned, back to his pace towards the laboratory.

The short black cape threaded with gold falling down his shoulders swayed in the rhythm of his steps. The swaying cape reminded me of the sway of a theatre curtain the moment before it opens… Will I like the show?

Something inside me, in the depths of my intuition told me I would not, but that, at the same time, this experience would nevertheless become an inseparable part of my life. Despite my resistance.

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